AI Music and the Dead Internet Theory

Ramen Junkie September 12, 2024 No Comments

A man was arrested for creating AI music and using bots to stream it, netting 10 million dollars from Spotify.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charged-with-10-million-streaming-scam-using-ai-generated-songs

A few things to note here, and some thoughts on it in general. He was doing this for a while, since 2017 according to the article, so it wasn’t like he made it in a month. Apparently, he was a music maker, he just wasn’t getting anywhere with his produced music. As he has been doing it since 2017, this predates even ChatGPT by about 5 years. He was not using the current crop of “AI” tools. My guess, he was just using a script of some kind to compile together loop tracks to mass-produce generic EDM music. Because AI is the current buzzword, this automation is being called AI by news outlets.

In the end though, the automation part is not the illegal part, it’s the scamming using bots that is the illegal part, as morally justified as it may be. Spotify is extremely popular, but Spotify doesn’t make artists any money. For example, Snoop Dogg, one of the most popular rap musicians ever, made about $45,000 for a billion plays. And a billion plays is a LOT. My favorite artist Aurora, has just under a billion plays on her most popular track, Runaway. The next most popular of her tracks is almost half that and third place is about 150 million plays.

Snoop Dogg has a LOT of plays.

The point is, that Spotify isn’t exactly the patron saint of supporting artists, and so the fraudster in the story above may be a bit morally justified in his efforts. That’s part of why I prefer to buy music, digitally, on CDs, on Vinyl. A larger chunk goes to the artist that way, especially on Bandcamp Fridays or buying direct from the band’s website, or even direct from the band at a show.

Anyway, I am not here to try to defend the guy in the original article above, just to talk a bit about AI and the Internet. I seriously doubt he is the only one doing this. He is just the first to get caught. Or at least the first high-profile one. Especially with current tools of AI, making it easier than ever to mass-produce garbage. Heck, I am pretty sure record labels themselves use software to pump up numbers on certain artists, less for the Spotify money, but for marketing.

But this also likely pushes into other areas too. It would be easy to do similar tricks on YouTube with bots, or Kindle Unlimited, just bots turning pages in free, AI-created eBooks.

A long while ago, probably a decade now, I came across a post on 4chan’s /g/ board (/g/ = Technology) with a guide on how to set up a Blogspot blog using scraping tools, add it to a ring of other Blogspot blogs, then automated a script that would click through the blogs gathering AdSense money from Google, to the benefit of anyone involved. I am pretty sure this was a regular post too, to keep new people coming in.

It’s the same principle as the automated Spotify system above. Hell, it may even be the brainchild of the same folks.

Which is all in the end just a version of the Dead Internet Theory.

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to intentionally manipulate the population and minimize organic human activity.

Which is probably less about “manipulating the population” and more just about extracting wealth through automated systems. Like the top level morally gray hero, it’s all a sort of, not necessarily evil activity. It’s very “Digital Robin Hood” in a way. Except instead of directly taking from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood is out making posts on 4chan on how to create automated blog systems. I mean, Google has replaced all of its systems for support and everything with bots, why shouldn’t the users replace themselves with bots as well? It’s bots all the way down!

Bots are trivially easy to build as well. One of the lessons in my 100 Days of Python class was making a bit that would play a cookie clicker game in a maximum my efficient way.

Even without using software it gets done in manual ways in the real world sometimes, for marketing purposes.  It’s all just manipulating the algorithm for money.  I guess in the end the trick is to do it in a way that it doesn’t harm the “wrong people”.  Sometimes I feel like I could be rich if I weren’t so honest because a lot of this isn’t that hard to do.